ANNOUNCE OROCOS v0.0.1

Hello,

Today, we released Orocos v0.0.1. Please visit our web site 
http://www.orocos.org for downloads and documentation.

CVS access will be available within a few days, the packages are ready for 
download from the Orocos web page.

Let us know if you plan to organise release parties ;-)

The release notes follow below.

Herman, Takis & Peter

OROCOS v0.0.1  Release Notes
----------------------------


We announce the release of the Open RObot COntrol Software v0.0.1, a
Free Software framework that provides a portable and configurable
infrastructure for controling robots (manipulators and mobile
platforms) and machine tools.  See http://www.orocos.org for a more
detailed description of the project goals and vision.

The project is still in its alpha stage, but the currently provided
functionality should run relatively stably. This release is mainly
meant for developers and interested users. The languages in use are C
and C++, but it is our intention to extend these with bindings to
other languages.

We currently support three operation modes: user space GNU/Linux and
kernel space Real-Time Linux and RTAI.  RTAI is best supported for
real time operation; Ecos will be supported in the future.

This release contains three packages: "Core," "Drivers" and "Motion Control".

  The Core package provides the functionality for a portable,
  object-oriented system infrastructure:

HeartBeat - A virtual, event enabled system clock
Events    - The main form of communication between software components
FOSI      - A C++ abstraction layer of the underlying operating system
FDI       - A first attempt to describe some system components interfaces
rtstl     - Enables the STL library transparantly in kernel space

  The Drivers package depends on the Core. Its aim is to provide
  implementations of the interfaces described in the FDI and delivers
  the following functionality:

Comedi C++ - An initial attempt at wrapping the Comedi library to C++ classes
Switch PP  - A component that converts parallel port interrupts to Events
Encoder    - A sample implementation of an event-enabled encoder component
             which fires when a certain position is reached.
Axis       - An example of combining the above three into an Axis-component,
             which provides a simple homing algorithm

  The Motion Control package contains an implementation of a PID control loop
  allowing type checked connection of control modules (e.g. Sensor readings,
  estimator results,...)

ServoLoop     - A template based, configurable control loop
ControlModule - A type checked Input/Output unit of data processing


Documentation is provided on the web site (see Download section) and
in each package under the doc dir. Our code is documented using Doxygen
style comments.